Sound Engineers and musicians will rejoice with the release of the SAFE project, or Semantic Audio Feature Extraction. The vague descriptions often used to get a particular sound in a mix, are being crowdsourced and applied to the set of VST plugins available for download from the SAFE project website.

Users can download the plugin and play around with the plugin parameters to get the sound just right, they can then tag the sound with semantic keywords such as ‘dreamy’, ‘fuzzy’ or ‘warm’. The plugin will analyse the audio to link the characteristics to those keywords. Working the other way, the user can also input a keyword or description and the plugin will change the settings to match the description based on the audio analysed from previously tagged audio.